5
REAL MEDITATION IS LETTING
GO OF CONTROL
“Cease practice based on intellectual
understanding, pursuing words and following
after speech. Learn the backward step that
turns your light inward to illuminate within.
Body and mind of themselves will drop away and
your original face will be manifest.”
– Dōgen
Most people, when they sit and meditate, try to guide and control their experience. They try to have fewer thoughts and achieve more peace so that the “I” they believe themselves to be can feel better. Of course the mind may become quieter, for a while anyway, and you might feel better, more peaceful, but sooner or later the mind will have something to say about being forced to shut up.
When meditation becomes a “means to an end”, we get stuck. In its struggle to remain in control, the mind will learn the various techniques to quiet itself, to become more mindful, to achieve stillness, insight, peace, and it will fool us into thinking we are progressing. But these are just mental states that have nothing to do with the true, unfabricated peace and stillness of your true nature, which cannot be achieved but only revealed.
If you teach the mind how to stay quiet, after some effort it will do so and may even get so good at it that you will think you have reached the ultimate, effortless state. But if your practice fabricates an enlightened state in which everything is peaceful and clear because there are no thoughts, that state is the result of mental effort.
The attention has been trained to not follow the movement of thought, to abide in itself without really knowing itself. And because this state is the product of the mind, it will eventually wear off. It may take years, but the minute you stop the practice, it will start to fade away.
The awakened state is the natural state of being. Natural means effortless, spontaneous, not contrived, not edited by anything. We can’t arrive at a natural stateless state with the manipulation or application of a technique.
People feel that if they let go of control, nothing will happen but awakening is slipping behind the meditator, behind the one engaged in the doing and the mastering. Awakening arises through the mind, not from the mind.
When we let go of control and accept what our experience actually is, we disengage the meditator, the controller, the manipulator, and the one applying effort. Then we can investigate what happens when we actually let go of control. This is not “doing nothing” or being lazy. It is applying just enough effort to be alert and aware, and enough surrender or relaxation to release the grasp of the mind.
The stories that we tell ourselves are the creation of a separate meditator. The two most prominent stories being “I need to meditate to become enlightened,” or “I’ve already got it and I don’t need to meditate.” All along it is our belief in these stories that keeps us separate from the true self.
All stories rise and fall like waves on the ocean of the Self. We don’t need to indulge them or get rid of them.
Whether we decide to meditate or not, fall into the aware presence that contains it all.
Our true nature is not produced nor is it created; it is always already here. In the same way that the sun is always present even when obscured by clouds, our true nature is obscured by patterns of body and mind that we mistake for ourselves.
Zen Master Eihei Dōgen said, “The Tao is basically perfect and all-pervading. How could it depend on practice and realization?” In other words, your essential self is already here and doesn’t depend on realization and practice. Yet as long as your mind is confused by concepts and beliefs, Dōgen also advised his students “to take the backward step that turns your light inward to illuminate the self.”
What keeps us from realizing our already present true nature is the desire to have things, do things and accumulate things all for the “I” we think we are. This drags our attention out into the “becoming”, because when we are attentive to “something” we are fixated on that something.
If we reverse the flow of attention to attention itself, we are free from all grasping. By resting in this shining, clear, peaceful, unassuming, steady, solid awareness, we know it to be the truth of our being.
By placing the attention on the one paying attention. By paying attention to what is paying attention.
What is the difference between paying attention and thinking? These are two very different things. They happen independently of one another. Paying attention is an experience; thinking is a construction. Simply experience that which is paying attention and rest in that.
The attention then shifts to perception itself, the awareness in which everything appears and disappears. This step is the “backward step” that Dōgen spoke of and what I call Instant Presence.
This “practice” is not about getting something you don’t have, but about recognizing what you already are. There is no need to try to attain what you actually are. Natural aware presence is not something you do, it’s not something you attain, because it is already self-existing. If it resonates with you, it can be used as a means of support in your recognition of what is always naturally present.
I study with a spiritual teacher and I have been practising with him for a few years. His advice is to keep the attention as much as possible on awareness by asking yourself, every time you are distracted, “What am I giving my attention to?”
Becoming conscious of where our attention is focused is a spiritual practice that helps to cut the identification with the mind. Eventually, however, we must realize that even attention itself is a phenomenon that must be abandoned. Even the attention, our most potent instrument of perception, is merely another fiction.
What is it that is aware of attention? What is aware of its presence or absence? There is something behind and before the attention that is even simpler, more subtle, and that exists without effort. What is this?
These are the questions that you need to ask yourself. The words are pointing to something. What are they pointing to?
This is where we must do away with answers – intellectual, mental or verbal. Here only direct realization will do.
Regardless of what techniques or methods you use, create some time where you let go of all “doings” and simply rest in Natural Presence, simply letting everything be just as it is.
Discover who you are when you let life be just what it is.
Discover what happens when there is no one controlling or making an effort at all, when you simply let everything be just as it is. Discover who you are when there is no managing of life just as it is.
For four years I have practised Ramana Maharshi’s method of self-inquiry, asking myself “Who Am I?” However, I am still unable to receive an intuitive sense of who I really am.
The teachings of Ramana Maharshi, one of the greatest sages of the last century, are the teachings of self-inquiry through the question, “Who am I?”
The answer to “Who am I?” is irrelevant. What’s relevant is the looking.
Asking the question, “Who am I?” is like holding up a mirror to try to look at yourself, yet no matter how much you look, nothing appears in the mirror. The “I” can never be found. But, at the same time, you are here. Look at that sense of “am-ness”, the sense of existing, here and now.
When you ask yourself the question “Who am I?” you will immediately notice a vast space, and that vast space is the answer. Ask the question, and then stop there, at the edge of a vast aware space of not knowing. Go no further. Allow the answer to reveal itself.
The point is not to find an answer. If you find an answer, throw it away. Any answer you find is useless.
During meditation I sometimes enter a space that feels very still and peaceful but I quickly lose consciousness and I come out feeling vague and spacey …
There is an experience that can sometimes happen during meditation where the awareness aspect of our original nature has been left out and consciousness is frozen in a kind of blank spaciness.
Some people think that this is our original nature, but it is not.
Remaining in an open but vacant state is to be blocked off from everything – no thoughts, no emotions and no awareness either. We may as well be a corpse. There may be no thoughts, we may feel empty, but the perceiving capacity is blocked off, frozen within a vacant state.
Because the wakefulness aspect is missing, this is nothing but a mind state of nothingness. All that one is doing in this still, vacant state is not following thoughts, but at the same time one is grasping or being fixated on stillness. The focus of attention is within itself, but it still doesn’t know itself. There is still an observer (consciousness) and an observed (stillness).
Being truly free is going beyond both the observed and the observer.
When you watch anything, there is always the observer and the thing being observed, but that observer is not a separate entity – that observer is the product of thought. There is no difference between the two.
When what is observed is realized as being the same as the observer, duality, conflict and the self comes to an end and it is realized that the emptiness or openness that is left is the true nature of the observer.
When you rest in awareness, every object is its own subject – we are not looking at stillness or peace or a flower; we are the stillness, the peace and the flower.
The observer is not a separate subject looking at an object, but it arises with the observed in the space of ever-present awareness as the expression and vehicle for Spirit, the eyes, ears and body of the Absolute, seeing the manifested reality as the Absolute sees it: everything, including the observer, as a ripple in the Awareness that I Am.
Keep looking directly into this, remembering that anything you can see is an object appearing in what you are. Keep discarding object after object, including the concept of nothingness. Something remains. What is that?